I happen to be in New Zealand just now, and the Kiwis went to the polls last Saturday (September 23). The right-of-centre National Party won a near-majority of seats and only needs to secure two more votes from the minor parties to form another government. I actually predicted this, but didnâ€™t get around to posting before. You can trust RBC bloggers implicitly, right? Right?

A few points for Americans, Brits and other outsiders.

An electoral system designed by adults
New Zealand has a unicameral parliament, filled by the â€œmixed-member proportionalâ€ system, aka “Additional Member”. This gives electors a dual vote for party and constituency candidate. The 71 constituency MPs are topped up from party lists to give proportionality. Itâ€™s the sort of scheme you get if you ask dispassionate Vulcans to suggest something, which is more or less how the Germans got it, and later the devolved assemblies for Scotland, Wales and London. So you tend to get moderate coalition governments. (The disadvantage is that you give too much leverage to small parties that can often act as kingmakers, instead of freezing them out completely as FPTP does.) All four of the main parties have been in and out of government in the last decade. Even the populist, anti-immigration â€œNew Zealand Firstâ€ party is a very genteel version of the type. Can you see the Front National, UKIP or Trumpâ€™s GOP including in their health policy a proposal to â€œincrease longitudinal data collection in health like a perinatal databaseâ€? Thatâ€™s as wonkish as the stuff HRC was sneered at for.

Helping voters vote
New Zealand is worried about the participation rate in elections: the time before it shockingly fell below 80%. Voting is not compulsory, as in Australia. USA 2016: 55%. Unlike the US, New Zealand is doing something to make voting easier. They have trialled early voting kiosks in shopping malls, covering a range of nearby constituencies. Instant registration? Naturally. Paper ballots? Naturally. There are automatic recounts and reconciliation with the electoral roll, so the definitive results take two weeks. Itâ€™s a good system, but nothing exceptional. Itâ€™s the USA that is the outlier, sticking to a worm-eaten, discriminatory, corrupt, profligate and inefficient electoral system out of Hogarth.
BTW, part of Lu’s Brazilian family have happily settled in New Zealand. They aren’t naturalized but have permanent resident rights. They were allowed to vote. And why not?

Democracy on a budget
Expenses for the seven-week campaign are capped by law. Counting the flat allowances for parties, constituency candidates, and the unequally distributed allocation for broadcasting airtime, the most the National Party at the head of the list can spend is NZ$5,091,260. The total costs of all 12 parties, many of them tiny no-hopers,Â must be in the area of NZ$25m, or US$18m. Thatâ€™s to elect the government for a country of 4.4m people and an area similar to Colorado. The special election in Georgia for a single Congressional seat cost over $30m.

What health policy?
A big yawn. Nobody wants to change a system thatâ€™s working well. The parties put health well down the list of issues: the campaign has been about immigration, housing, transport infrastructure, and taxes. This disinterest is entirely normal. Campaigns in the UK feature the NHS, but itâ€™s all about funding levels not the principle. Once you fix healthcare, on any one of half-a-dozen statist systems, it stays fixed. Here are the health pages on the partiesâ€™ platform websites: National Party, Labour, New Zealand First, Greens. See if you can find anything radical.

Tony de Brum, the Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands (pop. 53,000) has died.

He will be remembered for one thing only. But it was a big thing, and de Brum was the hedgehog. I’ve told the story before. In the closing days of the COP 21 conference in December 2015 that negotiated the Paris Agreement on climate change, there was still a big gap between the developing countries and the rich ones.

The G77 alliance of developing countries, led by China, India and South Africa, was demanding more and more language on differentiated responsibilities, to the extent of effectively going back to the disastrous Kyoto principle that only rich countries had to cut; more finance than the $100 bn a year promised in Copenhagen; and language on loss and damage that was unacceptably strong to the rich countries. However, the alliance was divided on the 1.5 degree aspiration, with the big four â€“ China, India, South Africa and Brazil â€“ against it.

This opened the door for a well executed diplomatic wedge.Â Tony de Brum of the Marshall Islands took the lead (at somebodyâ€™s suggestion, no telling whose) in forming a â€œcoalition of high ambitionâ€, including many of the G77 plus the EU, the USA, Canada and Australia. In effect, the rich countries offered 1.5 degrees to split the G77 and isolate the big four. The poor countries on their side had to drop the demands on differentiation and finance; on loss and damage, the difference seems to have been split â€“ but crucially with no admission of legal liability (Decision, paragraph 52). Before the end, Brazil jumped ship too. Their troops having deserted to the enemy, China, India and South Africa folded, and the way was open for the deal.

It is most unlikely that de Brum thought this up. He was not otherwise known as a Talleyrand, far from it. When he attended a meeting of the IMO, the UN organisation responsible for shipping, he was surprised to find that his country’s delegation had been taken over by the Virginia corporation that manages, and takes most of the loot from, his county’s vast shipping registry. On grounds of complexity and cui bono, the prime suspect for the Paris coup is Todd Stern, the wily and experienced US envoy. De Brum’s role was as the front man, the harmless guy everybody likes, the salesman. Don’t despise that: and de Brum was not a mercenary but fighting for his tiny country’s vital interests. It took a lot of commitment, nerve and chutzpah to face down China and India, and de Brum’s held to the end.

As it recedes into history, the Paris COP21 is emerging as one of the key moments in postwar history, on a par with the launch of the Marshall Plan or the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The inclusion of the 1.5 degree C target took far more knowledgeable observers than yours truly by surprise. Its role in the whole deal is to shift the Overton window: 2 degrees is no longer the wild upper limit of ambition, but the reasonable compromise that sensible men build into their calculations. The next steps in climate diplomacy will all be about whether to go firm on the harder target. There certainly won’t be any change in the easier one. Tillerson has conceded there are no actual US proposals for Trump’s promised â€œrenegotiationâ€ on the table, and if they were, they would be ignored.

The Leaders’ Declaration from the just-ended G20 summit in Hamburg runs to 14 pages of dense diplospeak prose, 5,311 words. Can anyone point to a single line that is a win for US diplomacy? If there had been one, Trump would have claimed it.

Or in any of the 14 other documents â€œagreedâ€ at the same time? Here they are, confirmation that German industriousness extends to paperwork. Site link if you feel up to it.

Agreed Documents

Hamburg Action Plan

Climate and Energy Action Plan for Growth

Hamburg Update: Taking forward the G20 Action Plan on the 2030 Agenda

Annual Progress Report 2017

G20 Action Plan on Marine Litter

G20 Africa Partnership

G20 Initiative for Rural Youth Employment

High Level Principles on the Liability of Legal Persons for Corruption

High Level Principles on Organizing against Corruption

High Level Principles on Countering Corruption in Customs

High Level Principles on Combatting Corruption related to Illegal Trade in Wildlife and Wildlife Products

G20 Initiative #eSkills4Girls

Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative

G20 Resource Efficiency Dialogue.

The media are concentrating on the one glaring defeat for Trump on climate. As I predicted last December, the other 19 have gone their own way:

We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The United States of America announced it will immediately cease the implementation of its current nationally-determined contribution and affirms its strong commitment to an approach that lowers emissions while supporting economic growth and improving energy security needs. The United States of America states it will endeavour to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in their nationally-determined contributions.

The Leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible. We reiterate the importance of fulfilling the UNFCCC commitment by developed countries in providing means of implementation including financial resources to assist developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation actions in line with Paris outcomes and note the OECD’s report â€œInvesting in Climate, Investing in Growthâ€. We reaffirm our strong commitment to the Paris Agreement, moving swiftly towards its full implementation … blah blah.

The US threat to help other countries backslide on their Paris commitments is empty. Even Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey refused to show any solidarity with Trump and signed on to the strong G19 statement, a major win for Merkel. There is no mention of North Korea, a major and immediate US headache, in the Declaration. Nor of Syria and Iraq. (The price was forgetting about the 2009 pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, no date given then or subsequently. It’s still there on page 12(!) of the â€Climate and Energy Action Plan for Growthâ€ annex, but the action has shrunk to token peer review. This suits Merkel, who does not want to pick a fight with her SPD coalition partners on a coal phaseout, so the German policy of continued dithering is now officially the world consensus.) [Update: Turkey is joining Russia in delaying Paris ratification, probably to get leverage with the EU. Unlike the USA, Turkey is building coal as well as renewable generating plants.]

Why did Trump fail so completely? It not just or even mainly because he’s thick. Continue Reading…

President Donald Trump has annoyed another lot of people. Not the defenceless PM of Montenegro or the President of Mexico or the Pope or the Mayor of London, but the commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran. Following Wednesday’s terrorist attack in the centre of TehranÂ including the Parliament and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomenei, Trump thought this was an appropriate comment:

States that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.

The Guards are not happy. Reuters reported this statement (my italics):

The deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards promised retaliation on Islamic State – the militant group that claimed responsibility – and its allies.

“Let there be no doubt that we will take revenge for today’s attacks in Tehran, on terrorists, their affiliates and their supporters,” Brigadier General Hossein Salami was quoted as saying by state media.

“This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the U.S. president (Donald Trump) and the (Saudi) backward leaders who support terrorists. The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack,” a Guards statement said.

The conspiracy theory would normally be unbelievable but with Trump you never know. â€œGo ahead, take the ayatollahs down a pegâ€? You also need to believe that Saudi responsibility for ISIS goes beyond the general toxic programme of funding Wahhabi and Salafist preachers all over the place to operational links to ISIS. Since al-Baghdadi’s modest programme includes exterminating the Saudi monarchy along with Iran’s apostate ayatollahs, this does not seem likely.

The Pasdaran is a complete parallel ideological military, with land, naval, air and missile units. The nearest analogy would be Himmler’s Waffen SS late in the Second World War, or Stalin’s NKVD troops. Its total strength is said to be 125,000, plus a 90,000 strong militia of probably limited military value. Still the Pasdaran has real aggressive capabilities in its 5,000 Marines and a similar number in the special ops Quds Force. If they choose to go after Trump personally, they can.

We can cross fingers that cooler heads will prevent an assassination or kidnap attempt, which would probably spark a full-grown war that Iran cannot afford. But there are plenty of lesser ways of damaging Trump personally that do not affect vital US interests. How hard can it be for a saboteur to to make a hotel unlettable, with food poisoning or rats? Or to wreck a golf course with a couple of jerrycans of gasoline and Roundup? A more elegant way would be to hire delinquent boys to release hundreds of moles on the greens. The joke is no doubt rather too Cambridge.

Ashurbanipal was a conqueror and warlord on the grand scale, and in his long reign (668-627 BCE) extended the Assyrian empire to include even Egypt. Assyrian treatment of the conquered was brutal, and included massacres, flayings and population transfers. Three kings later, a coalition of rebels led by Babylon destroyed the kingdom.

Assyrian cuneiform tablet, British Museum

But he was a cultivated and multilingual man and assembled possibly the world’s first great library. The British Museum has 30,000 fragments of cuneiform tablets taken by Layard, and that must be only a fraction. Persian traditions hold that the relics inspired Alexander to build his own, a project taken forward after his death by the Ptolemies at Alexandria.

Under Saddam Hussein, archaeologists hatched a plan to recreate a research library at Mosul University under the title of Ashurbanipal Library.Â It would be focussed on archaeology. The British Museum agreed to supply copies of all its collection. The plan moved ahead slowly after Saddam fell. A campaignÂ was launched by the Biblioteca AlexandrinaÂ in Cairo, another ambitious revival, directed at universities in the Arab world. Call this Library 2.

This is what Mosul University looks like today.

Credit Reuters

ISIS of course burnt the idolatrous library before the artillery and rockets got to work. The people in Cairo are relaunching the library campaign, though I couldn’t find anything on their website.

The archaeology research centre is a nice idea and I hope it moves ahead again. But what the students need tomorrow is a basic working library in all fields: science, languages, technology, medicine, law …. While the fighting on the East bank of the Tigris was still going on, students and professors were working to clear the rubble and start teaching again. The website is back up (only in Arabic). This determination deserves practical support. ISIS was a threat to all of us, and the people of Mosul paid very heavily for its destruction.

This does not look like a case where individual donations can be useful. It needs at least sponsorship from university departments and schools prepared to assemble a starter library in their discipline, plus expert input from librarians and IT people, and an operational fund from a government or billionaire. And tact as well: the university is in the Arab world, and that will be the language of instruction. Perhaps along with Kurdish? You see the problem.

The past 100 days have confirmed the obvious fact that President Trump is comprehensively unfit to hold public office. This reality is privately acknowledged among political and policy professionals in both parties–including by many who serve within the Trump administration itself. It’s still hard to believeÂ that we elected a grifting, alt-right demagogue to our highest national office. I certainly presumed America was better than that, that the traditional guardrails of our political system would protect us. Apparently, we are not, and these guardrails turned out to be weaker than we thought.

France faced a rather similar dilemma heading into this weekâ€™s election. French political leaders’ Â handling of this challenge provides an aching reminder of what might have been.

Officially, the Iraqi government is still dampening expectations of an early victory in Mosul. But the news on the ground tells a different story.

General Stephen Townsend, commanding the US â€œassistanceâ€ mission, last week: ISIS is down to 2,000 fighters in Mosul, including those now isolated in Tal Afar.

Iraqi Federal police, 28 February:Â since the start of the offensive on the West bank of the Tigris in Mosul, 900 ISIS fighters have been killed.

Unconfirmed local Iraqi report: 20 ISIS checkpoints in the semi-desert West of Mosul have been abandoned.

The Iraqi Army recaptured the large airport and the adjoining military base in about two days. In the earlier offensive on the East bank, ISIS held out in smaller districts for a week, and then counter-attacked with infiltrators.

It’s just possible that the weak resistance is part of a cunning plan to lure the Iraqi army into a costly house-to-house battle in the narrow streets of the old city. I don’t buy this. Fanatics don’t do tactical retreats. They are surrounded, low on ammunition, taking very heavy casualties, in a hostile population controlled by terror that will betray them at the first safe opportunity, and facing certain defeat. For Syrian and Iraqi ISIS fighters, melting into the civilian population only offers a slim chance of survival. For the foreigners, even that is nonexistent. They are stuck, like the French and Belgian SS soldiers who fought to the last in the centre of Berlin in May 1945 (source: Beevor). My guess is that they will be overrun in the next ten days.

Over the Syrian border, the Kurdish YPG militia (associated with Ocalan’s PKK and vehemently opposed by Turkey) has surrounded Raqqa on three sides, and cut the last road east on the north bank to Deir ez-Zor. The south is open, but the bridges over the Euphrates have been cut by bombing and the only crossing is by boat. There are unconfirmed reports that ISIS leaders have been evacuating their families from Raqqa into the countryside. That leaves ISIS holding three centres, cut off from each other, two under close siege.

The self-proclaimed caliphate will be gone in a few months. It may survive as a non-territorial conspiracy, a low-budget and even more extreme rival to al-Qaeda. But they don’t have the latter’s funding, organization, or experience. The attraction of ISIS to alienated young radical Muslim men across the world depended crucially on the caliphate claim, not just to statehood but empire. This absolutely required control of territory. I would not put it past them to pull a Jonestown rather than submit to shameful surrender. Not many of their enemies will be ready to leave them alive.

The end of the fake caliphate will be a victory for Obama’s proxy strategy, though Trump will surely claim it. In retrospect, it was bound to fail. A claim to universal dominion exercised by forced conversion, enslavement, and massacre of everybody in its reach cannot possibly work. The original expansion of Islam depended on the new religion’s exceptional tolerance for non-Muslim peoples of the book. The large numbers of converts from their new subjects were actually a problem to the Arab conquerors, and led to the Abbasid revolution. This contemporary bunch of millenarian crazies will leave nothing but an execrated memory.Photo credit

This morning I received an email from the National Academies Press (see the URL, below) containing both the script of President Trumpâ€™s recent Joint Address to Congress and â€” interspersed at relevant locations â€” copies of various NRC reports from the National Academies containing information, data and recommendations about the many scientific, engineering and medical issues facing our country (and the world).

This is a perfect representation of the Academiesâ€™ primary mission â€” to serve the federal government by bringing unbiased (and carefully refereed) technical and analytical expertise and results to the nationâ€™s decision-makers. Â I thought you, and friends and colleagues, might be interested in this document. Â Feel free to forward it to all and any.

The URL showing the script of President Trumpâ€™s recent Joint Address to Congress along with related NRC reports is at:

Trump may have been careless, but for Bannon, a trollish dog-whistle fits better. This song from Cabaret is pretty famous:

From the starting-point of 1932 the future did not work out too well for 12-year-old Hitlerjugend enthusiasts like the blond boy soloist. Membership became compulsory from 1936, and you can’t infer from membership that Josef Ratzinger or GÃ¼nter Grass were true believers. Grass has admitted he was, and applied for the U-Boat service at 17. Luckily for him, Grass was turned down, and had (like the boy in the photo below) to make do with a slightly less risky SS Panzer division, where he was lucky again to be merely wounded.

The next 10 years went pretty well for the Nazi cause – but they were followed by three years of unmitigated disaster and slaughter for Germans. One under-recognized reason for the complete reversal in German political culture after 1945 was the very high and selective death toll among convinced Nazis. They tended to volunteer for high-risk services like the Luftwaffe, the U-Boats, and front-line Waffen SS units. Of the 41,900 serving German submariners in WWII, 28,000 died: almost exactly two-thirds. The 12th SS â€œHitlerjugendâ€ Panzer Division arrived in Normandy in June 1944 with 20,540 men, soon commanded by the fanatical and ruthless Kurt Meyer. On August 22, at the end of the Normandy battle, his division was down to 300 men.Â SS units didn’t generate many POWs, especially on the Eastern front.Photo credit

The Nazi gamble on world domination was of course crazy from the outset. At least Donald Trump can look back at several historical moments of true American hegemony: 1919, 1945, and 1991. These partly reflected American economic and technical strength, but also and to a considerable extent the collapse of its adversaries and the exhaustion of its allies. Murphy’s Law struck everybody else, a stroke of geopolitical luck.Â 2017 is peacetime. There is nothing in sight to prevent the inevitable relative decline of the USA. China and India are much more populous, much poorer, and therefore growing faster.

Since 1945, and indeed before (as at Bretton Woods), American statesmen have sought to embed American values and interests in the world institutional order. It has been the only rational strategy for an outnumbered imperialist. Trump and Bannon despise this order and are are doing their worst to sabotage it by macho posturing, waving the bloody flag, and beating the tin drum of nationalism. The result is certain to accelerate, rather than delay, the inevitable readjustment.

The future won’t be American. It can still be a world in which Americans can be safe, respected and prosperous. The chances of this happy ending are shrinking ever day Trump stays in power.